The wealth of variety encouraged the eye back and forth
across the surface of the works yet an overall reading was
every so often interrupted by drawn elements that suggested
recessional space.
Beattie had given the room a metaphorical dimension – the
viewer stood surrounded by an array of choices - a revelation
of the dexterity and eloquence of mark making, in which a few
strokes of paint could prompt complex emotional responses. It
felt as if one might be standing inside the head of the artist,
glimpsing the fluctuating, ever-moving, re-focussing of thoughts.
Four years later in 1991 Beattie developed his ideas further in
Drawing on the Interior – a large-scale installation conceived
for the Eagle Gallery, for one of its inaugural exhibitions.
For an intense four month period he worked on a sequence of
nearly 700 works, made in Chinese ink on soft printing paper.
Each was dated, with a view to hanging them chronologically
as a vast visual diary.
Once in the space, however, it became apparent that the
relationships between the individual works produced their
own kind of rhythms. 376 of the drawings were selected to
completely fill the walls and were hung visually to encourage
readings that went horizontally, vertically and diagonally.
Reduced to the barest essentials, the weight of black mark on
thick creamy paper gave the installation an almost diagrammatic
quality. Falling towers, ziggurats, steps, ladders, doorways,
stacked blocks, thresholds – the simple forms carried inevitable
figurative associations. The work announced a final departure
from a long held allegiance to the philosophies and practice
of Abstract Expressionism from which Beattie came. Stripped
of the seductiveness of paint – the images clearly spilled into
the territory of semiotic language. They provided afterwards
the components from which Beattie would produce the most
forceful and successful paintings he has made, yet they hovered,
subtle and individual – allowing no certainties of interpretation.